Good series of recent posts on weblogs as a learning tool both for individuals and organizations. Here are ones I consider worth visiting and revisiting.
Stephen Downes – More Than Personal: The Impact of Weblogs. Good overview with a learning perspective.
Sebastian Fiedler on the use of weblogs as personal webpublishing systems to support self-directed learning:
I want supportive technologies with a high degree of freedom. Technologies that can be twisted and tweaked, that can adapt to my changing purposes and interests, that can grow with me over time. Personal Webpublishing systems are a big and important step into that direction. After all, I own that freaking publishing space and I can experiment as much (or as little) as I want.
James Farmer offers two interesting posts on how to use weblogs to create a learning management system (and Part Two)
Sebastian Fielder had a interesting post last month about the general idea of Learning Webs that builds on this observation by Ivan Ilich:
The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the question, 'What should someone learn?' but with the question, 'What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?'
When you start to think about learning as plugging into a network of resources and people, it's pretty clear how weblogs have a critical role to play.
Finally, from the Distance Education Online Symposium mailing list comes a nice post on weblogs in education (courtesy of David Carter-Tod)